


The Ghost We Share

by poorly_animated



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, F/M, Lime, M/M, Multi, Triad - Freeform, after yorknew arc, phantom troupe, phinks is in love with feitan, yes they have all slept with each other at some point
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:00:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26750293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poorly_animated/pseuds/poorly_animated
Summary: Phinks and the other founding members of the Phantom Troupe struggle with carrying Pakunoda’s lifetime of memories.
Relationships: Feitan/Phinks (Hunter X Hunter), Feitan/Phinks/Shalnark (Hunter x Hunter), Feitan/Shalnark (Hunter x Hunter), Machi/Pakunoda, Pakunoda/Phinks (Hunter X Hunter)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 16





	The Ghost We Share

You walk with her every day. The strangest things awaken her memories: washing the dishes and you see your own face through her eyes, passing over a bridge and you hear her laughing the first time she drove a car. The city is far too painful to linger in, dripping with the residue of her death. The six of you find it hard to look at each other. After the first night, when he tried to be with you and you each saw her memories of the other, his hands felt colder. Things you were never meant to know bubble to the surface. Her thoughts pluck at the threads of your friendships, haunting every conversation with her private observations about your worst traits. You drift towards the new girl, the replacements, anyone she never met or barely remembered. Her visions still crowd your head. Your love for him twists into a sick thing dragging its broken legs across the dirt. Each time you manage to touch you call him by her name, but he never corrects you. 

Years pass and she fades with your own memories, her voice growing fainter with the distance. Your last words were so cruel. She didn’t resent them in the slightest. She loved her far more than the rest of you realized, but once she knew she never recovered. One day she was just gone. Without her things somehow grew easier. You could look at each other and feel equal, beloved and resented in even measures. Dishonesty was an irrelevant way of the past, replaced by an extra lifetime experienced simultaneously by six people. When you found them together you weren’t even surprised. She’d seen it twice before so it played in triplicate between your eyelids and their bodies. Each of them tried to speak but the blonde finally just stood up and walked away. You look at the other on the floor and see them holding hands as children, sharing the corner of a cardboard box in a putrid heatwave. Even with all of his strength she thought of herself as his protector. He must be seeing you and seeing her see you, but you wonder when the memory that arrives hails from. Are you racing with her, playing a dangerous game as an excuse for murder? Is she gazing at you on the prairie, crawling towards you as the sun rises? Does he see her final glimpse of this world every time your eyes connect? 

It strikes you when the three of you sit down together. Her memories can’t focus on such an overload of familiarity, so you are left with a wave of passion and devotion. Their hands are on you as you take your next breath, falling backwards into a realm protected from her memories. Base instincts claw their way up from what remains of her subconscious and pour through you, layering your body with hers, a hundred times over. Each shuddering fingertip brings with it a gasp of residual sensation; each second of eye contact drowns you in emotion. You are crying before you realize he’s collapsed in a fit of delirium, your vision blurring as the other falls to the floor beside him.

After all this time, you always find her waiting for you inside his mouth. She never hated another person but she did not love him: she never truly forgave him for their first fight a year after you all banded together. Looking at him is like watching diamonds slip between your fingers into the gaping maws of a ravenous beast. The others are divided; two of them drifting away until they seem like characters in a half-remembered film. The three of you cling to the presence she forms between you. The blonde still needs to escape his own loss. A love that you could never hope for, but one that went unspoken until it was too late. You all need each other, relying on the echos of your shared years to drown out the memories. 

On your worst days, you watch her last seconds over and over again, hating the distrust that contorted your face the last time she saw it. You stare at the ceiling and watch her happiest moments without you, feel her relaxed in ways she never experienced with you by her side. You can even hear her think it, wondering how she found such a pure love after the mistake that was being with you. The other faces tacked onto the thought are your only comfort: a reminder that you were merely one of many who disappointed her. She still loved you in the end, loved you enough to throw her life away so you could go on. She didn’t resent your selfish insistence that she explain herself, leave your friend to die, carry on ruthlessly. She had hoped you would be honest with this one, tell him the feelings she’d read in you as easily as you could access her memories now. But she took all the words away. All six of you know every last secret she kept, every flash of desire or hatred that had ever crossed your minds. He craved you differently, and you chose to accept it. Some nights you pretend to sleep just to listen to them, wondering how they always seem to keep her at bay. He actually laughs one night, the sound rippling through her memories across a decade of friendship, and you remember what it felt like to die.


End file.
